Segmentation of audio data for indexing of conversational speech for real-time or postprocessing applications

A method of indexing audio data according to speaker, said audio data comprising conversational speech from a plurality of individual speakers, comprising the steps of:

• providing an individual Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for each individual speaker of the plurality of individual speakers of the audio data, each individual HMM including at least one state;
• constructing a speaker network HMM by connecting said individual HMMs in parallel;
• segmenting said audio data into segments by finding a most likely sequence of states through the speaker network HMM, each segment being associated with a one of the individual HMMs;
• determining for each segment an individual speaker of the plurality of individual speakers according to said individual HMMs;
• collecting segments from each individual;
• and
• outputting the results of the collected segments.